How to explain disbelief in the all-important Bible?

which is why you can find bibles from $10 to nearly $100 on thisamazon search page. and look. priced high to low lol. collectors edition bibles for thousands. so free and indiscriminant.Edited by brennakimi, : No reason given.

False dichotomy. The people who think that the Bible is a fantasy also consider the Bible to be very important --- to Christians. 'Cos it is. The reason that there are a lot of Bibles is, obviously, because there are a lot of Christians.

Opiate of the masses Phat?Every good drug dealer knows that you give out the first doses free, then you charge. How is the bible and associate religion not simply a commercial enterprise? You even pointed out, its on the topseller list.-x

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"Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact ” which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!"
-Stephen Jay Gould

Hi there Amen,
I think your OP has been fairly well answered by others, so I respectfully suggest that you consider your question in reverse. Instead of

quote:

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So why was it so important to be translated, copied, and is found in every book store, library, etc?

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why not ask why the early attempts to translate the bible into English were suppressed by the church?

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Mutate and Survive

Hi jar,
You say;

quote:

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For most of the history of Bible of the Western Canon, it was not accessible to the majority of worshipers. Costs to create a hand drawn copy were simply too high for the average person to manage and frankly, production times were so long that the supply was severely limited.

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It was only after the invention of mechanical automated printing and the translations into the vernacular that the Bible became something that was distributed in any quantity or available to the general public.

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That is all quite true, but it glosses over events like the execution of William Tyndale, for the crime of printing English translations of the bible. I'm not arguing with your point, I just think it only fair to place these events in the context of the church's opposition to letting the laity get their hands on those holy books.

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Mutate and Survive

The subject of the English Bible is one I find fascinating and one I used to teach in adult Sunday school classes. However to say "it glosses over events like the execution of William Tyndale, for the crime of printing English translations of the bible" is to so greatly simplify the story that almost all meaning is lost.If there is enough interest a thread on the history of the English Bible might be fun, but it will have to deal with the issues of politics, inheritance, conflicting calendars, debt and all the other factors that eventually led to the first politically correct Bible, the KJV.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I see what you mean.Funny true story. A while back a Muslim friend of mine gave me a copy of the Koran. Half the book was in Arabic and the other half in English. I began to read it but it made no sense to me. From page to page it was so confusing... Then one day I turned the page backward to the previous page to read again and I noticed that it made sense. Moral of the story? If you want to read the Koran, read it backward. The first page is actually the last page on the right Anyway, to answer the OP's question, I see the bible as like the Iliad and the Oddysey. They all make great mythologies. 1 parallel I could draw out of the bible and greek mythology:-The greeks killed all the men, threw all the children off the walls, and enslaved all the women of Troy.-The Jews killed all the men, women, and children of Jericho except for the virgin 12 year old girls.The parallel is for the longest time the greeks justified the act as moral. The christians are still justifying what happened to Jericho as a moral act. How? You see, the people of Jericho were sinners. Even the 2 year old little boys were going around raping the other 2 year old little girls, so they deserved to die. As Gen said, god is always just...

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Fair enough, but you seemed (unintentionally I'm sure)to be giving the impression that the bible has always been as widely circulated as technology permitted, which would also be oversimplified.

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Mutate and Survive

*Blink*You did not just say that did you?The bible is absolutely not free. In fact, when I was still a christian I once met an asian student who was a christian. One time he came to one of our prayer sessions with a Vietnamese bible. Someone jokingly said that he should have brought an English version, and the asian student said he couldn't afford it. A few days later, I gave him one of my copies and he was so happy he thanked me many times.If it's freely distributed, that guy shouldn't have been made to wait until he met me.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

clearly they are being given the bible freely and they just give the book-maker $60 because they are so thankful.

my Qu'ran has alternating arabic and english pages. and yes, like other semitic languages, arabic reads from right to left.

I understand the issue I believe, but always want to learn more. However the fact is Tyndale's Bible played only a minor part in his execution, which was actually for treason.The assertion that it was his English language Bible that was the issue is really a misrepresentation of all that was going on. His opposition to Henry's divorce and seeming support of the Papacy played a far bigger role. The Practyse of Prelates was far more a direct contributing factor.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

To avoid distractions, and the problem of how to account for varying literacy levels wouldn't it be true to say that a higher proportion of literate Muslims learn Arabic to read the Quran than Christians learn Hebrew or Greek to read the Bible in the original language ?

Certainly, Paul. But that wasn't what you said in the post I replied to.

I'll be off topic in doing so, but briefly, about 1,200,000,000 of the 1,500,000,000 are not native Arabic speakers, so that's why most don't understand any of the modern Arabic dialects.Then, rates of illiteracy are still high in some of the countries with the largest Muslim populations. Then, even amongst the literate, most aren't devout enough to actually learn to properly understand a dead language (classical Arabic).This is partly because of the bluegenes first law of religion, which is that if you actually read the scriptures of any religion, and then read one good book on the history and theology of that religion, you'll know more about the religion than most of its "followers".I've tried this theory out on Muslims in several different predominately Muslim countries (and on Hindus in India), and it works.Getting closer to the topic, you could try my theory out in your own supposedly Bible loving country. If you asked people on the street whether or not they're Christians, then, to those who say yes, ask something like "can you name the twelve apostles", or "how many Old Testament prophets can you name", I think the results would show that most "Christians" don't know their scriptures very well at all.